


Simpler Times

by amrita (rwbyfics)



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-03
Updated: 2015-04-03
Packaged: 2018-03-21 01:45:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3672894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rwbyfics/pseuds/amrita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re racing down an avenue of palm trees and mansions, but Maeby wants to be where everything is simpler. The type of simple where she sat on the model home’s carpet with George Michael and got fake drunk off of fake wine. It’s the simple that she remembers the best, and the one where she’s spent the most time with George Michael.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Simpler Times

Maeby pulls her hair up and shoves the sunglasses on top of her head down to cover her eyes. Newport Beach is a real life paradise in summertime, and she has the luxury of Gangy and Pop Pop’s penthouse balcony to suntan on. She’s never been one to schlep all the way down to the beach with the rest of the plebeians who flooded Southern California anytime that it teetered above 75 degrees, and the seaside in Boston was a place that remained mainly unexplored for the Bluth-Fünkes.

“Relax a little, George Michael,” She says, tipping her head back towards the sunlight. “It’s the summer before we head to college; have some fun, kiddo.” George Michael’s sitting on the edge of a patio chair like he’s in class - shoulders back, spine straight, eyes glued to the stucco wall to the right of Maeby’s ear.

He looks like one of those diagrams that they show of proper posture in computer lab, when in all reality, you just fling yourself across a chair and sift through the Internet for five hours with your hand in a bowl of candy beans. But that’s George Michael, always doing things proper and righteous because no one’s taught him otherwise.

Poor kid.

“I-I don’t know, maybe I should go down to the banana stand and see if my dad needs some hel - ” George Michael starts out, voice wavering in that way when he’s nervous. Maeby’s not in the mood to convince him to loosen up, and stays reclined, letting the sun warm every inch of her skin.

“Your dad’s fine, George Michael. He’s a grown man. But hey, suit yourself. I’m going to get a tan, and you can go and subject yourself to the vicious cycle of availability.” She shrugs, and the pure disinterest is apparent in the quick rise and slump of her shoulders. George Michael sits back down; he’d gotten up halfway.

“What’s that?”

Maeby sits up immediately in dismay.

“You don’t know? Oh, George Michael, you should at least know the name of the disease you’re dying a slow, painful death from.” Maeby tips her sunglasses down her nose, regards George Michael with a touch of pity. “The vicious cycle of availability: you make yourself available, as you do so often. This involves showing up early, filling in for people, and the deadliest of sins - volunteering.”

Maeby shudders.

“Then, people start realizing that you’re the scapegoat that they’ve been waiting for all their lives. You end up doing twice the amount of work when you could have been doing half. And then, you die sad and alone - ” Maeby looks George Michael up and down, and he shivers at the hint of Gangy in her gaze. “ - and a virgin.”

“You know what, maybe I will stay here.” George Michael stumbles over his words and Maeby grins at him, pushing her sunglasses up her nose again. She scoots over to give her cousin some room on the pool towel that she’s thrown against the concrete.

“Cop a squat.”

He obliges, and their skin touches at the exact point where his pale brown capris end and the edge of her bikini bottoms stray. Maeby avoids his wide eyed gaze and looks at the sun, reflecting rays across the lenses. She sighs, pats George Michael’s hand wistfully.

“Gonna be a good summer, George Michael. Maybe our best yet.”

*

So it turns out that Maeby’s prediction veers way off course. Good to know that she’s not clairvoyant though.

Unless the definition of a “good summer” involves their grandmother stealing a historic ship, heading for sea, changing her mind, and heading back for shore towards a whole new set of legal issues, then no, it was not a good summer.

Maeby’s got back her old job of trying to get her parents to notice her, but they’re too stuck in their heads to see that she’s desperate for any kind of attention, good or bad. But hey, at least she has a tan, right?

George Michael withdraws into his studies and somehow becomes less fun, as if that’s even possible. Uncle Michael walks around with a crazy gleam in his eye that kind of reminds Maeby of her mom on Teamocil (that brings back a lot of memories scored by a poorly tuned autoharp), Gob is the same brand of uninformed ignorance, and Buster freaks out on a daily basis. Gangy and Pop Pop, the roots of this fucked up family tree, are on a whole different level of crazy that Maeby keeps her distance. They’ve always been on the brink of a spiral, but she thinks that this might be what sets them off for good.  

Sometimes she drops by the penthouse during lunch block to watch Buster have a panic attack. He’ll open a can of soup with his hook for her, they’ll share a laugh, and then he’ll devolve into a puddle of a human being at the first mention of the words “seal” and “Mother.”

It’s nice to have something that stays the same no matter what, Maeby thinks as she watches her uncle writhe around the penthouse floor with his hook catching on every smooth surface near him.

Maeby’s good at keeping herself busy though. She works harder than ever, and slowly realizes that no one pays attention when she’s afloat. So she throws some stones into the old education boat while greenlighting ten projects at Imagine Entertainment.

So she fails senior year. No problem, take it another time around the block, or at least until someone sits her down and tells her that she’s making the biggest mistake of her life. Maeby supposes she could have that talk with herself, but then again, where’s the fun in that?

It’s life, and everyone’s got one shot at it, but she’s Maeby god damn Fünke, and she’s going to make herself immortal.

*

So it turns out Maeby Fünke is just another weak little human being on this insignificant bullshit planet, and she’s going to die like everyone else. Probably before she turns fifty, because of the stress that sluices five years off her life every single time that she thinks about Fakeblock or her sixth year of senior year or the fact that she hasn’t had a good lay in five years or anything that involves her family.

God damn, her family.

Family by marriage, technically. No part of her bloodline could be traced back to the Bluths, thank God. Maeby likes to think that she’s nothing like them, but here, spread eagled in the middle of Fakeblock HQ, she faces the facts that she’s a Bluth replica, an exact photocopy.

“I am so screwed.” She says to no one in particular. She’s alone anyways, always alone. Might as well be her middle name. The warehouse’s floors are steel, and she lies there on cold metal, looking like the Vitruvian Man. The Vitruvian Man never had to deal with shit like this, Maeby thinks.

“Maeby?” The voice is familiar, and Maeby smiles faintly, closes her eyes and sinks into it. “Maeby, what are you doing here?” She looks up to meet eyes with George Michael. Maeby sighs, but remains motionless.

“Dying, George Michael. Just slowly dying, like the rest of us.” George Michael looks around to see if she’s referring to any other people in the warehouse. She looks at the box that he’s holding. “What are you doing?”

“I just came to pick up some stuff. Are you okay?”

Maeby looks off into space and rolls onto her side, away from George Michael. She can feel the exact place where George Michael’s staring at the back of her neck, the small valley of skin that some of her curls have lifted to reveal. She’s gotten so used to feeling his eyes pinned there since they were young, through charity functions, boat parties, family dinners. It’s familiar. It’s sweet.

“I don’t really know.”

There’s a silence, then George Michael sets down his box and settles down onto the floor next to his cousin. His eyes haven’t left the nape of her neck for a minute, and she tries to keep her breathing normal. Normal, this is normal. Lying on the floor of your fake business two centimeters away from your cousin that you conveniently sucked face with was a textbook example of normal.

“You know, when we were younger, I used to think that you knew everything.” George Michael’s voice is softer, unguarded. Maeby knows that he hasn’t noticed, or even done it deliberately, but he’s put walls up to keep her out, and it stings every time they speak. “You were just so… effortless. You did anything that you wanted to do. I think that’s why I… I fell in love with you.”

Maeby laughs, dry and bitter.

“Hate to break it to you, George Michael, but I don’t know shit. I don’t do anything that _I_ want to do, I do it so someone will pay attention to me. Everything, kissing you, the film studio job, Fakeblock - I just want someone to look at me and really look at me.” Maeby curls tighter into herself. “I guess this is when you fall out of love with me.”

“I could never fall out of love with you!” The answer is instantaneous, falls out of George Michael’s mouth with such reckless abandon that it even surprises him, and he coughs to cover the surprised lilt in Maeby’s breathing. “I don’t think I want to either.” He adds quietly.

The spot at the back of Maeby’s neck is on fire by now, disrupting into ash and cinders.

George Michael moves closer, and he presses his hand to Maeby’s arm. It’s chaste to an outsider’s eye, and toes the edge between a supportive gesture and the beginning of something really fucked up. Maeby turns towards him slowly, half to face him and half to give the back of her neck a break. George Michael looks as scared as she feels. She can appreciate that.

Maeby reaches up to cup George Michael’s cheek, her other hand resting at the base of her ribcage. She can feel her heart there, fluttering to the same rhythm that it set on the first night that they kissed. That’s George Michael’s rhythm, she recognizes it like the back of her hand.

“Maeby,” George Michael says slowly. “What are we doing?”

“Making a mistake.” Maeby’s never said the word mistake before like it wasn’t one, but God, it’s freeing as hell. George Michael slides his hand towards her shoulder, up to the space behind her neck. His fingers cover the exact spot that his eyes had focused on mere minutes before.

“We’ve already made so many.” His words are a reminder, but they feel unimportant when Maeby slots her thumb at his earlobe.

“Another one won’t make a difference.”

*

 ****But it does. God knows it does.

*

_(“Oh - Oh, wait, wait, can we put this on hold? This floor is fucking cold.”_

_“Wanna take this back to my place?”_

_“Sure, but I can’t stay the night. I’ve got school in the morning.”)_

*

Maeby might not live forever, but she kind of feels immortal when George Michael’s around.

*****

School the next day is different. Perfecto keeps wanting to talk to her, keeps mentioning ducking behind the bleachers, and before Maeby has the chance to tell him to get lost, she’s put in handcuffs and has time for the words “Registered Sex Offender” to sink in from the back of a cop car.

She calls George Michael at the police station, and he comes down to sort things out. Maeby mentions the false pretenses of Perfecto’s age and the fact that she was, indeed, over 21 and on a school campus, and the officers questioning her remain stolid.

“Any relatives we can call for you, kid? You might be here awhile.”

“Yeah, my mother and father won’t show up if you call them, but you should call my grandma, and she’ll connect you to the nearest uncle. Her name’s Lucille Bluth; you should have her in the system by now.” At the mention of Gangy’s name, the police officers sort of pale and go talk to their chief.

They pull some strings and let her go, assuring her that they’ll find a way for the charges to be dropped. They let her know that she should stay in the state though, in case she has to be called in for further questioning. Maeby waves them off and walks out of the station, hand in hand with George Michael.

She slips into the Cadillac that George Michael hasn’t had the time to switch out yet - still smells like Lucille 2’s perfume, bless her soul - smiles halfly at him as he turns the engine over. He returns it, and they drive through LA a bit aimlessly. Maeby finds out that George Michael likes to drive fast, when in all reality, he’s pressing his foot to the gas pedal so that he can direct most of his attention to Maeby.

“We should run away.” Maeby calls through the tumbling wind that twists every single curl in her hair backwards and forwards. George Michael runs through a yellow light, too busy staring at her in surprise.

“You have to stay in the state!” He shouts back. Good old George Michael, always playing by the book. Maeby puts her hand out the window and the wind whips through her fingers, forms around them shapelessly.

They’re racing down an avenue of palm trees and mansions, but Maeby wants to be where everything is simpler. The type of simple where she sat on the model home’s carpet with George Michael and got fake drunk off of fake wine. It’s the simple that she remembers the best, and the one where she’s spent the most time with George Michael.

“California’s 163,696 square miles large, George Michael. We’ve got plenty of places to go.” She’s already pulling up a list of sightseeing destinations on her phone, all of the places that her parents never took her, when she catches him staring at her. “Look, you try taking senior year five times - you learn irrelevant information whether you want to or not!”

George Michael shakes his head and smiles.

“It’s not that.” The wind takes Maeby’s hair and the back of her neck slips into view. His smile gets bigger, and she grins back through the hair covering her face. “It’s definitely not that.”

 


End file.
